Ronnie O'Sullivan's return to the snooker World Championship is the season's stand-out event

It might be memory playing me false, but I seem to recall that in springs gone
by, the weather was warm, daffodils swayed, and sporting weekends gathered
around the television followed on in swift and relentless succession: Boat
Race, Grand National, snooker World Championship, FA Cup final.

Shot of happiness: Ronnie O'Sullivan celebrates with the World Championship trophy in 2012Photo: GETTY IMAGES

Those big events were part of our family life so it was with some sadness that I realised this week that I had failed to watch the Boat Race (again), and that if I miss the Grand National on Saturday it will be the third year in succession that I have failed even to pick a horse.

As for the Cup final, I cannot actively remember making a date to watch it since I was actually at Wembley to see Eric Cantona strike the winning goal for Manchester United against Liverpool – and that must be 17 years ago, because I was pregnant with my oldest son at the time.

This capacity to skip the big events is partly a result of the increased availability of sporting viewing. In the digital television age, the fact that you can constantly snack on sport, spoils your appetite for a big banquet.

If you are a fan of National Hunt racing, you will not miss Aintree; nor will you fail to settle down in front of the FA Cup if your team are playing. But it seems to me that these epic gladiatorial contests are all suffering from their own difficulties.

The FA Cup gets lost in the sheer attritional length of the Premier League; Aintree is beset by concerns about its safety; the Boat Race was always a specialised taste and seems less and less relevant.

As for snooker, a programme tonight on ITV reminds me just how far it has diminished since its glory days. It is the misfortune of this documentary on Ronnie O’Sullivan – one in a series of Sports Life Stories, originally shown on ITV4 – to have been made before the latest perturbations in the 37-year-old’s life and career.

Filmed just after his astonishing victory in last year’s World Championship, when he became the oldest man since Ray Reardon in 1978 to win the game’s top trophy, it ends with O’Sullivan confidently proclaiming that he has nothing left to prove and his demons are behind him.

Thereafter things happened. A little less than a year ago he put away his cue and once again forswore snooker. In February, he changed his mind.

Two days before the deadline for entry to this year’s World Championship, the charismatic but troubled star confirmed that he would defend his title, despite having played only one competitive match in the past 12 months, a shock 4-3 loss to world No85 Simon Bedford.

O’Sullivan has been unclear about the personal problems that forced him into self-imposed exile, promising that all will be revealed in a book – presumably the autobiography that is slated for October.

But as the documentary makes pretty clear, his difficulties are likely to spring from the source they have always done: the relationship with his father, who served 18 years in prison for murder, and O’Sullivan’s love-hate relationship with snooker, which is entirely bound up with his emotions about his father.

Combined with the clinical depression that has dogged him all his adult life, it is a potently complicated brew.

When O’Sullivan announced his comeback, he said: “Sometimes, it did feel like the end of the world when I was playing. Maybe, I’ll appreciate it a bit more. There was a point where I just sat there and I thought: ‘Even in my darkest moments of snooker, I’d probably take them back now.’”

Watching the documentary and watching him play, you worry for him. But you want to see him, and not only for his enormous talent.

Snooker was once so watchable because players had personalities as big as their baize tables. Now, it is played by identikit and proficient young men whom it is hard to tell apart.

O’Sullivan was the last of a great line of snooker players who were known outside the sport. His successors, men such as the deeply talented Judd Trump and the world No1, Mark Selby, are loved by their fans, but have no appeal beyond the snooker hall.

In that sense, the return of O’Sullivan, perhaps the most naturally talented player of all time, is reason to rejoice: here is a man who can make snooker an event once more.

April 20 at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield has suddenly become a date for the diary.